Eyetrack III Team produces interesting results
The Eyetrack III team has published a new, outstanding summary of their research about how people view web-pages. I found several key things interesting in this article, namely:
1) The Zig-Zag pattern in which people scan the page is not new; what I found interesting is that they view the right hand side of the page second, and significantly, in comparison to the right hand page. We often use this space for “latest news” or other trend highlights, so it’s great to see that is a general eye-searching pattern.
2) Smaller type causes people to spend more time reviewing the articles - perhaps this is the web version of “Those who cannot hear an angry shout may strain to hear a whisper.”
3) Top Navigation performed best - this is a key thing to note as there is often an important design consideration on where navigation should be placed. Generally we use the left hand side for secondary or tertiary navigation just from an aesthetics standpoint; this is an additional consideration when deciding on layout.
4) Larger images performed better than smaller - interesting considering the reverse is true with text font. Photos with faces also performed extremely well - one of the reasons I think Facebook is so successful–focusing on the “face” aspect of a person’s profile.
5) Consider this: Text ads received an average of 7 seconds of attention whereas the typical display or banner ad received 1.6 seconds. They don’t go into click through or which ad performs better from a follow-through perspective; however if you look at the success of that add from a branding/impression standpoint - you’ve put out your message to someone for 7 seconds if you do it via text - that’s a lot of time to be thinking about your product/service offering.
6) More on advertising: placing ads in line with the content helped the performance of the viewability of the ads.
7) While I think their sample size is probably too small to be statistically relevant, I find it interesting that people had a better recall of facts that were presented with text than those that were presented over multi-media. New ideas/concepts were better received using multi-media - so if you have a cutting edge idea, you may want to consider multi-media devices to get the message across. If your message is fact based, text may be the way to go.
All in all I think this article has a lot for us to consider in the design community for better website interaction and how we can engage users in the way they want to be engaged by natural habits. The main question I’m left with is: Did previous iterations of website cause our behavior or is it inborn? In other words, did we create these habits and can as a community influence change, or are they inborn habits that we can take advantage of for a better user experience?
The original article is available here: http://www.poynterextra.org/eyetrack2004/main.htm
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